It was impossible to think of carrying the heavy canvas sack for any distance, and so he hoisted it into the low fork of a tree, intending to get Dave to come down and help him bring it home. He had brought a few delicacies as presents for the younger children—a box of candy, a box of dates and figs—and he crammed these into his pockets, put his rifle under his arm, and started inland.
There was a sort of trail, as the canoeman had said—a faint indication of wheelmarks certainly made no later than last autumn. It was possible to follow them, however, and here and there trees had been cut to open the way; after perhaps a mile of tramping Tom came in sight of the barn he expected.
It was a rough, unchinked log structure, with the door yawning wide, standing close by a wide flat of long grass and reeds, through which a tiny stream slowly wandered—evidently the beaver meadow where Dave had cut his hay. But there was no house in sight, and the woods came up densely around the beaver meadow, with no trace of either road or clearing.
Tom’s heart sank with discouragement. Nevertheless, the barn indicated that he was on the right track, and the house could not be very remote. Experimentally he uncased his rifle and fired it—three shots, the wilderness signal of distress. No woodsman would neglect to answer that call, and he listened long for an answering signal, but none came. The whiskey-jacks squalled from the spruces, excited by the shots, but there was nothing else.
He struck off, however, beyond the beaver meadow, still in the same direction he had been going. Within half a mile he came upon a rushing, swollen little river, doubtless the same which he had seen flowing into the lake. He followed its shores for some distance, and then struck away into the woods, on the watch for a blazed trail or any sign of clearing. But he had been walking in irregular directions for nearly an hour when he suddenly stumbled into a half-cleared road and saw the opening of a large clearing ahead. Full of hope, he rushed forward and then stopped short with a cry of despair.
Before him lay a stumpy clearing of perhaps a dozen acres, showing something green at one end but overgrown with dead weeds at the other. There was no house, but a great heap of charred timber and ashes showed where a house had once stood and had been burned down.
“This must be the wrong place; it must be further on,” Tom muttered, struggling against a horrible conviction. But he went up and examined the wreck left from the fire.
Amid the pell-mell confusion of half-burned logs, joists, and planks was a litter of tin cans, broken kitchenware, scraps of paper and cloth. He could not make out any relics of any sort of furniture; most of the household effects must have been salvaged. There was a broken iron pot, half full of water and deep red with rust—an old ax with the handle burned out. Everything showed signs of having been exposed to the wet a long time. Plainly the fire had not taken place this spring. It must have been during the winter, or, more likely, last autumn.
But surely this wretched place, this tiny clearing, could not be the prosperous homestead that he had imagined Uncle Phil to possess. He groped over the rubbish in search of some evidence. He turned up a scrap of planed board which might have been part of a door-casing. Letters were cut on it with a jack-knife. They were partly charred away, but what was left was plain enough, and he spelled the confirmatory letters “ave Jackso.” It was Dave’s work, he could hardly doubt; and a few moments later he unearthed a tattered book, a copy of Scott’s “Ivanhoe,” water-soaked and scorched, but with his cousin Ed’s name scribbled a dozen times on the fly-leaves.
Tom groaned. There could be no further doubt, nor hope. It was the place, right enough; but the house had been burned and the family had gone, abandoning the claim. Where they had gone he could not even guess; probably it was far, since none of them had been seen at Oakley all winter.